Canopy Glow

Two points of clarification: Canopy Glow represents significant progress from Anathallo's 2006 debut Floating World, an album that, to put it mildly, we didn't care much for-- if you're not into Sufjan band-wagoneering or Mars Volta's conceptual tomfoolery, let alone a garish synthesis of the two, you possibly felt the same way. But Canopy Glow is close enough in sonic character to its predecessor that its release on hip-hop label Anticon feels like one of the oddest pairings in recent years.

The immediate difference on Canopy Glow is Anathallo's decision to slim down while somehow getting their weight up-- in the time it takes to read this review, you might watch only two Floating World song titles scroll across an iPod screen; most songs feel padded beyond six minutes, something you might expect on a record centered around Japanese folklore. Like much of Canopy Glow, "Noni's Field" takes its time emerging from its reverby cloak, but after the sleep is shaken out it builds to a rousing chant that sets the stage for LP highlight "Italo". Title aside, it's less Sally Shapiro than Sufjan Stevens, as Anathallo subtly mix fractured meters and a dirgey minor progression that gives the track an unsettling undertow.

Such grounding is rare on much of the record-- like a band class show-and-tell, Anathallo go gonzo for every instrument except bass, leaving wispy tunes like "Northern Lights" and "John J. Audubon" to float rudderless. In a foolhardy or thoughtless bit of self-promotion, Anathallo liken themselves to a "marching band gone wild" (at least it's not "on acid"), which is unfortunately inaccurate on two fronts. Canopy Glow often lacks the propulsion that could inspire couch-bound channel surfing, let alone marching-- which is pretty inexplicable for a band that claims six out of its seven members as percussionists. And even as indie's obsession with orchestral arrangements appears to wane, there's still nothing particularly wild about Canopy Glow's puffy souflees-- though some fawn over the fact they have toured with two glockenspiel players, those guys need to actually do something other than come off like baroque-pop SW1s.

Still, Anathallo are learning on the job, even if they seem bound to play, at best, second fiddle/banjo/bassoon to Sufjan and his crew's increasingly suspicious absence. Too many of Anathallo's peers from the aborted blog uprising of 2006 took a lack of immediate success defensively and ungracefully bowed out, so it's heartening to see them so willing to ride this bells-and-whistles thing until the wheels fall off. And really, hanging out with an unexpected patron saint like Yoni Wolf can probably only lead to good things (particularly since he knows how to make a xylophone bump). But for the time being, the unnatural and unnerving smoothness of Canopy Glow shows that if there was any one Anticon record that deserved to be called Alopecia, it's this one.